From the first moments of "Gimme Shelter," director Ron Krauss finds his movie's locus of meaning in the face of Vanessa Hudgens as Apple, a pregnant teenager on the street. He films her in close-up, with a hand-held camera, in a style very much like that of the Dardenne brothers, the Belgian filmmakers who specialize in desperate youth and life on the fringes.

This internal technique, which seeks out intimate moments of character revelation, is exciting to see in an American film - for 15 minutes. That's about how long it takes to realize that "Gimme Shelter" is not about a soul's movements, that it doesn't have the psychological detail and richness to support this filmmaking approach. The movie, rather, is about external things, not inner states, and adopting the technique becomes merely a matter of style for style's sake.

In a similar way, the movie takes the title of the great Rolling Stones song and the inspired 1970 documentary of the same name by David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin. The story has nothing to do with the song or the documentary - the title isn't even a reference. It's just an ill-considered appropriation.

For Hudgens, "Gimme Shelter" is an opportunity to show that she can act, but we knew that already from "Beastly" in 2011. What this movie really shows is that she's game and ambitious. As Apple, she must go through hell: brawls with her drug-addicted mother (Rosario Dawson), abandonment, homelessness and eating out of garbage pails. Hudgens cuts her hair, smudges her eye makeup and acts ugly until we see her that way. But still, her performance comes only in glimmers, and when we're supposed to feel something, all we feel is the obligation to feel something, not actual emotion.

This might not be all Hudgens' fault. She excels in the movie's smartest and best-written scene, the one in which Apple's drug-addled mother tries to persuade her to come home with her. As Hudgens listens, the camera lingers for a long time on her face as a whole range of powerful and conflicting thoughts and feelings cross her eyes and pull at her mouth.

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But for most of "Gimme Shelter," Krauss seems content to let Hudgens be a blank wall. He lets her play anger as her only note, which means that Apple is constantly covered. And then, as the finish draws near, he has her not be angry, so she's relaxed enough to smile. But the feeling is not one of journey and arrival, but rather of a trying time in the company of a trying character - one who shows us as little as she shows the other people on screen.

Still, "Gimme Shelter" is an attempt at something grand, and though it doesn't get halfway there, it covers some ground. Dawson, an under-appreciated talent, takes the acting honors here for her abandoned performance as the mother, in all her flailing, raging and pathetic desperation. And you have to give Krauss credit for at least trying to tell an uplifting story - not that it ever quite achieves liftoff. Now and again, though, it does hover.